According to the sociology professor, their awareness of the seaside city on Japan’s southwestern main island of Kyushu is often limited to the few World War II-related details they were exposed to in high school.

“There’s a picture of the mushroom cloud in their high school history textbook, and that’s about it,” Nolan said in an interview with Kyodo News.

His interdisciplinary course, first offered in 2025, investigates historical narratives from and about Nagasaki from the 16th century through the bombing and its aftermath. Another of his courses, “Going Nuclear: American Culture in the Atomic Age,” traces the history of nuclear development from the Manhattan Project to the present day.

Nolan’s grandfather, a doctor specializing in radiology and obstetrics-gynecology, worked on the Manhattan Project and was involved in some of the earliest nuclear bomb detonations, beginning with his contributions to safety and evacuation planning for the Trinity test site in New Mexico.

In his book “Atomic Doctors: Conscience and Complicity at the Dawn of the Nuclear Age,” Nolan details the role of doctors including his grandfather in both discovering and selectively concealing the dangers of radiation from nuclear weapons.

Nolan’s grandfather later traveled to the Pacific with the radioactive core of the “Little Boy” bomb that the United States ultimately dropped on Hiroshima. After the war, he visited both Hiroshima and Nagasaki to help conduct a military-led medical investigation in the aftermath of the bombings.

During his own research visits to the two cities, the professor found Nagasaki particularly compelling because of its distinct identity as an international port city and the historic center of Christianity in Japan.

The course begins with the atomic bombing of Nagasaki just three days after Hiroshima, some 300 kilometers to the northeast on Japan’s main island of Honshu, was decimated in the world’s first wartime use of a nuclear weapon. It examines the dominant narratives that emerged within Nagasaki, in Japan as a whole, and in the United States regarding the bombing.

From there, Nolan takes students back to 16th-century Nagasaki to explore the development of the city as a trading hub, the influence of Christianity, and the city’s relationship with Western countries.

The phrase “Nagasaki prays, Hiroshima rages” serves as an entry point to approach the two cities’ differing responses to the devastating nuclear attacks.

Nolan points out that by 1945, Christian communities in Nagasaki had already endured centuries of religious persecution. Beginning in the 16th century, local authorities waged a brutal campaign of torture and execution to suppress Christianity, with the remaining believers persisting through their faith.

“You can’t really understand the response (to the A-bombing) in Nagasaki unless you understand this history,” Nolan says.

Urakami, a Christian stronghold in Nagasaki, was ground zero for the explosion caused by the plutonium-based “Fat Man” atomic bomb. The Catholic Urakami Cathedral was badly damaged.

Christians there had been subjected to the last and most severe of a series of government crackdowns, known as the Urakami Yoban Kuzure, in the latter half of the 19th century.

The United States, among other countries, interceded on behalf of the persecuted Christians at the time. It is one of the ironies of Nagasaki’s history that the United States then selected the city decades later as the target of the second atomic bombing, Nolan said.

In scholarship about the U.S. nuclear attacks, Hiroshima is often the focus or the only city mentioned.

“I think Nagasaki is the city that’s forgotten,” Nolan said. “That’s one reason to pay attention to it.”

The tendency to forget Nagasaki, he added, can be traced in part to the bombing taking place just days after the attack on Hiroshima.

But the timing alone does not explain Nagasaki’s relative obscurity in public memory, according to the professor. Nagasaki’s significance as a military target was less clear-cut than Hiroshima’s, and its history as an international city and the center of Christianity in Japan also weakened claims that the bombing was necessary or justified.

Nolan’s class draws attention to the immediate and long-term destruction wrought on the city by the atomic bombing.

In doing so, he seeks to defy a tendency toward abstraction when the bombings are discussed. Such distance from the lived experience, Nolan contends, has served the U.S. military and others eager to downplay the extent of the damage and the long-term effects of radiation.

If first-hand testimony from Nagasaki had spread widely, Nolan said, “the devastating effects of radiation” might have made Americans “reconsider the whole nuclear enterprise.”

Nolan assigns texts such as Susan Southard’s “Nagasaki” — a nonfiction account of Nagasaki atomic bomb survivors — and Catholic doctor Takashi Nagai’s “The Bells of Nagasaki,” which relays first-person perspectives of the bombing and its aftermath.

“If you actually get close to the lives of the people, you see the depths of their suffering,” Nolan said.

In both his scholarship and his teaching, Nolan examines the disparate narratives that took shape after the bombing, as the United States assumed or evaded responsibility, and as the people of Nagasaki responded to the horrors of a nuclear attack and sought to rebuild.

Such narratives, he said, continue to shape the ways in which the history of Nagasaki is, and is not, taught.

Original source: JP